Inverted
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I can’t imagine a graveyard spiral from 19k with no real pilot intervention until impact. Could very well be though.
Lifeguard Fatal Five in Nevada Feb 24, 2023
- Thread starter fholbert
- Start date
I can’t imagine a graveyard spiral from 19k with no real pilot intervention until impact. Could very well be though.
Boris Badenov
This is no laughing matter.
I wouldn't bet any money either way.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
I mean barring a catastrophic mechanical failure (which seems unlikely given the radar returns) it’s hard to think of a scenario where a second pilot wouldn’t have at least given a better chance of a good outcome. Same with GF in Hawaii and in Kake Alaska.
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
Whatever it was it sure was quick from the looks of it... I don't know if this fellow was a "noob" or not, but this sort of thing has been a major concern of mine over the last couple years up here. There are now lots of people with not enough practice making decisions operating aviation appliances in extremely challenging conditions, with limited external experience to guide them.
Not that I was any different skill-wise when I was starting (I sucked) - and indeed I've noticed a trend of good judgment in this new generation of pilots; but when I was starting out I did have great coworkers with 30,000+ hours doing that sort of work to guide and mentor me (call me a dumbass to my face). Given that many of the really experienced guys and gals are retiring or finally able to get a "good job where they don't fly 1400 hours a year" I think there's an alarming chance we'll see more of this in the 135 world.
I don't mind guys like this speculating - indeed I support speculation of all kinds, but I do kind of resent guys who've never done this sort of job casting aspersions and judgment on these folks. This is challenging and necessary work, and "yet another single pilot medevac accident" is a • take from some guy flying for an airline. His biggest and most challenging professional ethics decision is likely his choice of crew meal and he's asking about "what external pressures were on the pilot?" He's got the balls to say, "you should just not go." I guess that's me being an ass, and probably not fair. But he's doing effectively the "t-ball" of aviation jobs dispatch sets everything up and you swing for the fences. Single pilot IFR in mountainous terrain is hard work, rewarding work - but hard; I guess I just don't like the implication that this guy somehow sucked, or this is some major cultural problem in the medevac industry - which I found to be extremely forward thinking and risk-averse while I did it - and that really it would all be better "if we all had the good judgment to not go."
That's easier said than done sometimes - and being self-aware enough to say "I think this flight is too much to handle right now" is a lot harder when the ambulance shows up with a sick kid and a grieving parent. I recognize that bad judgment may have played a role in this accident, but having done flights before that I look back on and think "man, it was stupid for me to go and be pressured because of this or that" I think the best I can say is "there but for the grace of god go I."
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
This is always the case - largely, "two heads are better than one." That said, I'm reminded of Amir and Emily's accident at little Ace so many winters ago... the official NTSB take is "loss of control for undetermined reasons."
Boris Badenov
This is no laughing matter.
First, excellent post. Second, while it's all very neutered (to the extent possible, and rightfully so), anyone who has flown medevac and claims that they never pushed it *just a little bit* for the "mission" is either a liar or a monster.
Have pushed all kinds of Wx and flight conditions, mostly all at night, in order to get a needed mission done; all for life/limb/eyesight reasons. Stupid on any regular day of the week? Absolutely, Necessary in the times I’ve made the decision to press? Absolutely. There but for the grace and all, they have to date, ended up as the right decisions…..or perhaps the wrong decisions, executed in the right way,
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
I may have (may have) went to max continuous power on a flight when a lady coded in the back of the airplane in direct contravention of company policy requiring us to use some lower power setting - I was book legal, but not "operating in accordance with the GOM." I may have stopped my climb early (I was in VMC anyway) and told ATC I couldn't accept any vectors and made them scramble to reroute a myriad of HAL flights I wouldn't deviate for to get her on the ground more quickly. I may have landed long and rolled to the end to save time, probably in excess of the company taxi speed.
She died in the back of the airplane before we could offload her anyway. But I tried to do everything in my power to get her where she needed to be. I don't know how I could have lived with myself if I had done otherwise.
Most flights were not that exciting, and most of the time, it was the easiest job I've ever had, and yeah, there may have been better judgment I could have used in that particular moment. Thinking back on that exact flight, I could have flown a more standardized / squared off pattern, not taxied at 40+ kts down the runway. In hindsight, her survival was out of my hands; I could have just flown my flight planned route, I maybe saved 50 seconds lol and inconvenienced the hell out of HCF.
That's really hard to think about / do when the whole plane is wiggling around as the medics give chest compressions and the blood is pounding in your ears or when someone is creaming bloody-murder, or when it's a kid. I am fortunate that the weather was great and smooth, and it wasn't at night in a snowstorm in Nevada.
People can talk a big game about how the PIC in question "should" not have gone in the first place, but I challenge anyone to doom someone to certain death in front of the family members because the weather is crummy. Until we know more about the flight, the patient, the passenger etc. we should be cautious about being too critical of the pilot.
You're not supposed to know "how sick" the patient is, or "how critical" things are... but sometimes it's pretty obvious.
Hence why cautious about hard-core speculating. And why armchair wannabe-investigator idiots like Dan Gryder and his less angry little brother Juan Browne, so annoy the crap out of me with their idiotic clickbait accident videos they make right after an accident, trying to wrap things up like a 1 hour prime time crime episode.
We have no idea the decision making the PIC had and what information that was gathered or at his disposal. Or what he knew or didn’t know that affected a launch decision. That will come in time.
In many operations, the pilot isn’t supposed to know anything at all about the mission, until he/she chooses to accept the dispatch. If the dispatch is turned down, then the idea is they will never know what it was for. Once accepted, after checking Wx, etc and all other factors that go into accepting or declining, then the mission info comes down. That may be different for the fixed wing EMS world, or some parts of it. I say some parts, because there are places where the fixed wing EMS doesn’t operate that much different in missions and such, then the helo EMS does.
tlove482
Well-Known Member
Uh Oh, I'm a monster
ppragman
FLIPY FLAPS!
I mean, some times you can tell just by the tone of voice of your medics. Some times you have sobbing mom on the airplane, sometimes you have the guy who had his head split open in a bar fight and you see all the gory detail as you load him on the airplane.
You definitely accept the flight in the dark about what's going on, but you're there to load the guy or gal onto the airplane. The unconscious body language of your medics is usually a dead giveaway about how screwed up things are sometimes, but they're also largely emotionless robots who've seen literally everything imaginable lol. Then some medics don't care and will just tell you, "hey dude, this patient is real sick, can you shave any time off the flight" - which most of the time the real answer is "not really" but usually your answer is "I'll try man."
I have never known how sick the patient was prior to accepting the flight, but I pretty frequently knew roughly how sick they were prior to adding power.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
I feel it’s really premature to be discussing the pilots weather or other decision making here, although the side tangent of pressures or lack thereof in medevac flying is eternally worth discussing in general. A PC12 is a very capable all weather airplane and the very limited information we do have doesn’t exactly scream “weather or other bad decision making” to me but hopefully we’ll find out.
PenguinAviator
Looks sharp in a tuxedo
The truth has been spoken.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
Honestly, I tried harder back when I was flying Papa Murphys pizza and Amazon boxes of dog food, because it was if not outright encouraged then at least not discouraged. Here as I was told during initial “the nurses are more scared than you, so if you’re nervous they’re probably terrified” plus for the most part they’d rather be watching TV or baking than flying so they’re always looking for an excuse not to fly. Management is 800 miles away, so any pressure to fly in our program is entirely self-imposed and yeah, maybe 5 years of air taxi flying isn’t the best base to build on for controlling that self imposed pressure.
Roger Roger
Bottom of the list
Agree with all of the first parts. I don’t subscribe to the “we should never speculate on an accident!!” Theory, but in this case there’s so little to go off of AND what little there is doesn’t support these kind of hypotheses IMHO. FWIW if you put a gun to my head and said “give it your best guess” I’d be on the Boris program of pilot incapacitation or spatial d, probably initiated by some kind of equipment malfunction, but at this point that’s just that, a guess.
As to the last part I can only speak to our program, but there are only rarely times when we know anything about the patient prior to accepting the flight. One scenario is a very large patient, when we need to verify that they will fit in the aircraft. Another would be if we are tight on duty time and trying to verify that we can do a quick turn picking up the patient and move them before we time out, in which case it helps the med crew to know what’s wrong.
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Speculation is fine, but it has to be informed speculation. Too much of the speculation out there gets based on nothing concrete, and starts to become a “fact of its own making”. That is what I caution against, and why I hold the complete disdain I do for these armchair investigators; especially as someone who has painstakingly gone through details and facts while working an aircraft accident, ensuring to carefully go where facts or information lead to, and to not get sidetracked by assumptions or feelings or anything else not in evidence. Thats where my angle comes from.
Boris Badenov
This is no laughing matter.
Kill it before it lays its eggs!Uh Oh, I'm a monster
Boots2Wings
Just happy to be here.
TBF, these jobs don't take long to scare the beejebus out of you as a Noob...that's kinda the allure, at least it was for me; to see if I could "walk the walk" after doing nothing but talking for my first thousand hours. Glad I did it, got many a good story and the old "yea I was on fire my first week" turns heads in interviews; but someone else said it best, "Best job I never want to do again". I wont speculate on this one, more so, I am trying to avoid texting my buddy who flies for these guys in the same AO to make sure he's ok; some how that feels too anxious or "real" for me.
I will say, the old adage, especially in THIS business, that sooner or later, you'll know the crew on one of these flights comes a lot sooner than most realize.
RIP
fholbert
Mod's - Please don't edit my posts!
Maybe? You think he was manually flying the aircraft into the flight levels?
Moderate turbulence was reported. Could he have found some stronger turbulence that damaged the aircraft?
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